


Of the Lost and the Path that happened after:

by TheLightdancer



Category: DCU (Comics), Hellraiser (Movies), Lucifer (Comic), Marvel (Comics), The Sandman (Comics)
Genre: Hellraiser element is a small set of cameos in early chapters, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-09
Updated: 2021-02-18
Packaged: 2021-03-14 22:00:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 17,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29303088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLightdancer/pseuds/TheLightdancer
Summary: In her thousandth iteration of the known universe, Death of the Endless tries a path for the first time, hoping that it will break the monotony of her lives.
Relationships: Death of the Endless/Demons, Death of the Endless/Jason Todd, Death of the Endless/Lucifer Morningstar, Death of the Endless/Mazikeen, Mazikeen/Lucifer Morningstar (Vertigo Comics)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 6





	1. Two if By Sea

_In a Place that is Everywhere and Nowhere:_

Destruction of the Endless was wary when his sister turned up, looking cheerful at a completely different note. She knew what he was planning. So did Dream, so did Desire. So, of course, did Destiny and their older brother with the stick up his ass had said nothing to him except giving him a quizzical smile as if he was content. _That_ had given him second thoughts where nothing else, so far, had. 

Destruction remembered all too well what it was to venture with the Oan to find his sister and give the Oan the boost he needed to do so. He remembered vividly the glimpse of places that were beyond their plane of existence. Eyes like dead stars and the horrific runes carved into his sister's body. What it took to unleash his function to unmake them and then to find himself cast out and hoping that the Oan succeeded. So Krona had, and the price for it had taken a deep toll on the mortal's sanity. It was a bond that none but he and Death shared, and Dream was deeply envious of it at times.

He thought of that in the way her mouth moved and the gestures she had, at once delicate and trusting him in a way she only did with Dream, at once distant and remote. As if he were more of a client than her brother.

His ginger eyebrow raised, and he spoke, his voice having a grating edge that made him wince after, but having spoken he could not unspeak his words.

_Come to try to dissuade me like Morpheus?_

His sister shook her head.

**_No. Of all of us, little bro, I understand most._ **

He jolted slightly. That was not the response he expected, and the cynical smile that crossed her black lips intensified his reaction of surprise. 

_**I came to wish you well, and to ask you only one simple thing. If it should turn out that you are not the only one to leave, look after Del.** _

He froze.

_You? Why would you leave?_

She shrugged.

 ** _Mother asked me to be a_** _**parent to all of you. I have done that, for a very long time, lil' bro.**_ Her gaze seemed haunted, by secrets he could not fathom. _**A very, very long time.**_

He wanted to ask, but he did not dare.

Instead he looked at her curiously when he pointed to the stars.

_I've always liked those, sis. Out of everything I do in my sphere, I like them most They are immense and even we of the Endless, we seem so very small. How have you managed it? Your burden is greater than mine in scale but not so different, I think,in what it asks of you._

Her smile was faint.

_**We're small all right, lil' bro. We are. We're all powerful and yet we are nothing at all. You know, we all know what our brother Destiny does. Most of us just never bother to know, or to find out.** _

Destruction snorted.

_I stepped in a hole and smacked my face into the ground before we met up here. If I know everything our brother does, wouldn't I have not stepped in the damned hole?_

That strange haunted look and Death shook her head.

**_That's....not how it works, brother. I think even I can forget what a chore it must be to be our oldest brother. To live every second of life as if it were scripted. If he did take steps not to be caught up in it, I like to think I'd understand what he would do if he did and it affected me. But.....to live that life is to know no surprises. To live a life purely determined, step by step, as if in scripts or panels, with little boxes informing a reader of something that a concept of two dimensions would not._ **

She shrugged. 

_**Even our older brother is small. It shouldn't bother you. To think in terms of power the way you do, and then of insignificance? I don't agree. We're not great or small, we just are. Dream has a Kingdom. Destiny....sees everything. You have Barnabus and a realm of your own. Despair her rats, and Desire......has Desire.** _

Destruction jolted at the bitter and nasty laugh from Death. He hadn't believed his older sister was capable of sounding like that and the lesson was not lost on him.

**_I know what you're going to do, even if I don't want you to. Not now, a couple of centuries, maybe. Now you're just mooting the idea, you feel small after feeling like one of the biggest things and you want to weigh everything._ **

She put her hand on his shoulder. 

**_As I said, if you do go through with it, and I'm not going to stop you or dissuade you or try to tell you otherwise.....just look after Del._ **

He heard that note of sadness in her voice and before he could ask her there was a sound of wings and she was gone. 

He scratched his head and shrugged. A new star was about to be born and he had seen her give her breath to make it so.

Now for the fun part, he grinned, as he raised his sword and gave his focus to what was unfolding.

\--------

_A year later, meeting hall of the Endless._

Only Destiny expected this, for his was a burden to live a life without surprises. Yet his face registered discontent, worry. It was so unusual an expression that it had Del sober, accepting the pain to be rational, to focus herself and her being to understand what made their older brother uneasy. That pain meant that she was quieter, and even Desire, who otherwise would have goaded her and Dream for xir own amusement was quiet, wary. 

Destruction stepped in with complete bemusement on his face, as did Despair and Dream.

When Death stood up before them, she looked at them all quietly for a time, memorizing every detail of their faces as if she never expected to see them again. That phrase, which occurred to Destruction, Dream, and Desire at the same time became haunting in the aftermath of the words she said. The passage of time was quiet, silent, stretching into something long and uncomfortable and awkward.

Then Death looked them all in the eye. It was three hundred years before a sorcerer would capture an exhausted and weakened Dream-King seeking to find the Lost, and to try to use her to bargain with the Endless for a great reward. It was five years before Destruction weighed things and came to his own conclusion and his own path, and chose a very different life, deciding his family had seen enough of a shakeup.

It was the first time, too, that they saw their sister wearing a formal dress, long and flowing, open-shouldered, her ankh golden instead of silver.

Her eyes were moist and her voice quavered, but she did not stutter and her words were simple.

_**I will retain my function for we all know what that means. But I am no longer of you, nor among you.** _

_**Farewell.** _

And then in a flash of light and a sound of beating wings she was not, and there was a sudden wrenching sense of understanding what was spoken only after a passage of minutes. Destruction stared, eyes wide, and uncertain. He looked to his siblings and he could not fathom what had happened and why, his eyes jolting around. He saw that Delirium blinked and then stood up and shouted: 

_SiS cOmE bAcK we NeEd YoU!_

_SiS plEaSe!_

Nothing responded.

Dream stared in open-mouthed horror, a look of betrayal and deep grief on his face, one that became a deep and abiding anger.

Destruction's uncomprehending look met that of Despair, who tore at herself with her hooks, the smell of her iridescent blood in the room.

Desire said nothing and seemed outwardly unaffected yet light grew near xir fingers and there was a drumming, a betrayal of something much deeper in her very nature than anything she'd imagined.

Destruction turned to Destiny and their eyeless brother stared with a look of genuine fear on his face, scrolling through his book and shaking his head and scrolling back and forward. Destruction's eyes widened. _That_ couldn't be good.

Silence stretched out, and then Dream stood up and the violence of his rising hurled his chair from behind him. He snarled, and then slammed his fist on the desk with a booming impact that jolted all of them, an explosion of his rage that rippled outward, the table cracking in the weight of that anger and the smouldering wrath and ruin

 **She left us,** he growled. **We have no sister. Let her name not be spoken any longer. She is The Lost.**

Her portrait crumbled to ash, leaving nothing. 

Her apartment, forlorn and abandoned became a place of dust and lost memories. It was preserved by will of the Endless though they seldom went there. Nothing rotted, it was merely covered with dust and a sense of isolation. Dream took Slim and Wandsworth where they became part of the moat around his kingdom and his castle, Del took Death's teddy, renaming him Arminius (and whether by her love for her sister or her very nature Arminius came alive and became her companion and her friend, giving her less of a sense of isolation than she'd had a minder who reflected the part of her that was Sanity and Reason).

\-------

Death of the Endless, her gallery contained in a small dimension quite literally contained in the pocket of one of her jeans, stepped into a realm that oozed malice and discontent.

She nodded at the guards of the gate of Dis, and gritted her teeth slightly.

She was no fan of Lucifer the Morningstar, and she had a feeling of what he would demand of her as a price for her staying where she would, and for a place to get her bearings where her siblings would never think to look for her, or to find her.

She shrugged. If it was what he asked.....she would manage. And after a lapse of centuries she was sure she'd be able to look herself in a mirror again.

With that thought echoing in her head, she tapped her umbrella against her shoulder, and took her first steps into the realm of Hell, where Lucifer was king, in a time long before he entertained leaving his job and his responsibilities in the way she had abandoned her family.

The steps seemed to recede forever but Death was not worried.

She had never done this before, and it was the thousandth iteration she had lived. She had never tried to abandon the family and not her position, or taken the precise chain of circumstances she had here.

Nothing else had worked, and the last universe was one where she'd tried a means to destroy herself she was sure would work and that had failed, and made her endure the smothering familial attachments of Del and Dream and even Destruction.

Into Hell strode Death, and she quirked her lip slightly. Perhaps she should have ridden in on a pale horse.


	2. Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Death enters the throneroom of Lucifer the Morningstar, after dealing with a few obnoxious demons.

_The Ash Throne, Throneroom of Lucifer:_

The Morningstar brooded on his throne. It was a good day for brooding, for Hell's weather was hot and stirred with a fell wind. The lord of the Eighth Circle had learned, by ill circumstance, of the message that had been brought to him within the blink of an eye after the event that had occurred. 

\------

Lucien the Librarian, Dream of the Endless's most frequently used herald, had appeared before his Throne in a flash of light and a chorus of eerie music even by the debauched standards of his kingdom. He had no love for the Dreaming's heralds, though it was more of a reflection of his distaste for the master of the Dreaming. Long ago Dream had left one of his lovers in his domain in a fit of pique, overriding all protocol and flexing his strength in a rare reminder that he who was story had a power over all planes as his that he did not need to flex, usually.

He had been humbled, humiliated before his servants and all Hell with him. The anger was to the master, not the servants, who were less beings and more independent facets of their master's will, things he created and could destroy on a whim.

The sight of thin, reedy Lucien adjusting his glasses and bowing before him, however, did draw his attention. So too the words the keeper of the books never written spoke:

_To his illustrious cousin, King of Dis, Lord of Pandaemonium:  
_

_Greetings, cousin. I bring to you a message of hope, of wishes._

_My sister left our family for a reason that she did not specify. There are few places she could go so suddenly after this that could hide her from all gazes save that of our eldest brother. If she should come to you, I ask that you tell me, and tell me in what condition she arrived. She is all I have in my family, cousin. I humble myself to ask you this._

_Morpheus, Lord of the Dreaming._

\------

It was a strange message and Lucifer dismissed it out of hand. A glimpse of the heavy-handed kind of humor the Dream-king indulged in in the rare occasions that the mood came to him. If any of that family were to have left he would have wagered on the youngest walking off into some obscure land and never returning, or on the burly ginger Destruction. Death? From his understanding of her she was responsible to a fault, obsessed with her family and the idea of family over her own function. And in the few times they spoke to each other, he'd caught mere glimpses of something hidden within her, a deep set of emotional issues contained, if poorly, and oh so deliciously tempting.

He despised the Dream-King all the same, and the Lord Shaper had given him a perfect weapon to use..... _if_ there was an element of truth to it.

\--------

_Beyond the Gates of Dis:_

Death walked with her umbrella at her side. She had no great taste for Lucifer or his Kingdom, and she did not think that she ever would. 

There was pain here, old and deep-rooted. It chafed at her feelings and her very being, it clawed at her essence with the same wild-eyed fire that led the demons in their torment of others as they were themselves tormented. It ripped and it tore, and it burned and burned and burned. Hell's presence was a thing of her siblings. Desire's asexual love of amusement for xir own sake, Despair's rats gnawing at flesh as her hooks ripped into it, her mirrors full of the images of all who were in her power. Del's whimsy. The Dream of Heaven that made the torments worse. The Destruction of the souls that would regenerate and then endure the same miseries....and the Destiny that drew all things together.

Her boots made no sound, but then they seldom did, and seldom did she want to. She walked past various circles, in a straight path down a road of tears and bone to the throneroom.

It was a long walk and the pains that seared into her did not help, nor did the flashes of the damned who became aware of her and raged at her for what was their own decision. All things made their own Hell, even he who was its king.

Her walk continued until three beings materialized in front of her. The center was a being of eldritch darkness, eyes upon eyes, mouths upon mouths, the mouths gnashing against each other.

The right had two faces, one in a forever-smug grin, one in a forever-harsh gaze.

To the left was a being of stoic splendor marred by an ugly sadist's leer, and the great bat-wings that shone from his back with a hellish light.

Azazel, Choronzon, Sandalphon. Three of Lucifer's most powerful servants. Sandalphon not yet turned against his master, though in times to come he would and would initiate a dreadful scheme involving the manipulation of Lucifer's brother the Demiurgos.

The other two would remain loyal more to Hell as concept than Lucifer in time to come, though for now they served its first and original king.

It was the hundred thousand mouthed and three hundred thousand eyed-darkness that spoke first, a jagged slashing set of sounds that tore into her ears.

**_It is not our lord's time yet, Death of the Endless. Why have you come here?_ **

She looked at him stoically, retreating into old masks. She hated this place, it would not do to let what kindness was in her out. The old her, the one of ice and brittleness....that would have to do. Placing her umbrella against her back, holding it with both of her arms, she spoke calmly.

_**What business I have is with Lucifer the King of Hell himself. It is not with you. Allow me to pass.** _

The demons all laughed, low and fearsome trembles, amplifying the terror and cutting edges of this place, the flames that licked outward and caressed parts of her body.

 _ **I don't think we will,**_ said Sandalphon, who stepped over and sought to place his hand upon her. When she saw where his hand was descending, she moved with a blinding speed and slammed her umbrella's edge, for a moment sharp as any blade could be, straight into his foot. The look on his face was comical, the perfect angelic beauty of Sandalphon was beautiful. His face went pale and his mouth opened in what was initially a silent scream and then became a wail of greater pain, as he hopped around on one foot.

The two true-demons, not Fallen Angels, could not resist a sharp set of peals of laughter at the angel's expense, before their gaze returned to her.

 ** _Not that we have any opposition to seeing angels humbled on general principles,_** Azazel spoke, before moving much closer to her, **_but you have attacked a lord of this place. All he would have done would be to give one of your breasts a squeeze. In this place, where his power is concerned, that's his equivalent of tweaking a nose. He even meddles with my teeth. Foolish, creature. Very foolish._**

A voice coughed, the cough marred by the snarl across the ruined half of her face.

The demons froze, and then turned to another, the arch-agent of the Morningstar.

Mazikeen tapped the flat of her blade against her wrist and they dispersed, Sandalphon limping. Mazikeen's undamaged half of her face twisted into a smile and she made a sinister choking sound that was her equivalent of laughter, before her eyes met that of Death, who looked at her unrepentantly, Sandalphon's golden blood dripping still from the umbrella.

_Zhe mazzer wansch zu zshpeak zu you._

Death nodded. Two sets of footsteps followed and in a very short time they came to the elaborate doors adorned with sigils of horror and menace, writings in the twisted variant of Enochian used by demons as the script of Hell itself.

Mazikeen knocked a single time and the runes shifted and flowed like water, and the doors opened.

_Keenocsh ansh za doorsh zhall be opschened._

Death glared for a moment and then let out a bark of unwanted laughter, and then strode into the the Morningstar's Throneroom. 

She was vaguely disconcerted to see a look of surprise and concern on the Morningstar's face.

What he said next cut more deeply in turn.

**_Your brother asked me if you showed up here to tell him where you were. It seems that your family is taking your disappearing on them....poorly._ **

Steepling his hands and leaning forward on his throne, seeming to swell in size and to loom, eyes shining like the radiance of his own father, the look that he and the Demiurgos and the Presence all shared, Lucifer gave her a grin that left her feeling much more uneasy.

_**Between that and your humbling my oldest confederate, as amusing a thing as it was and is, you have given me trouble already and I have no real reason to allow you to reside here.** _

The amusement vanished and the regal stare that bored into her left her reminded of exactly why she disliked the Morningstar, and what it was about him that made her uneasy around him.

_**Convince me to let you stay and not to inform your brother, or be damned to you and leave this place never to return.** _


	3. "Of All Sad Words of Sword or Pen"

_The Dreaming, Throneroom of Dream of the Endless:_

Clad in darkness as dark as his hair and his sister's, Dream of the Endless brooded on his throne, his fingers brushing his chin. His sister was clad in clothes darker than his, but she was a bright sun that shone and illuminated what was otherwise dreary, a voice he could always rely on. That voice was silenced, forever. The worst part was that he didn't know _why._ Was it something he'd done? That he'd left _un_ done? If Destruction, who in so many ways held them together, left, Death could keep them a family still, if one balky and distant. Destruction still was among them, though like all of them save her he did not relish going into his siblings' realm save in dire need. If any of them left save her, it could still be, though he knew in some alternate universe where he took this path Death would have retreated back into being brittle and isolated. 

Once she had been so different. Then he had been closest of all of them to Desire.....

And as if that thought had been a symbol, Desire's portrait pulsed with a light that oozed the wishes for what could have been and the fears of what might have been. Love, lust, hate, anger, warmth, coldness. All emanated from a light that did not merely glow it pulsed. Dream gritted his teeth and then spoke in a cold voice, his practiced voice as a King:

**Enter, Desire.**

From the portrait emerged his sibling, xir eyes bright golden lights, always golden. Desire was anything xie wished to be, and today xie was a stocky and stout masculine figure, stubble coating xir chin. Xie wore a garment like the flannel of later years among mortals, the chest open, sigil gleaming on a necklace. Xie also wore jeans and boots. 

_Decided on the Tom of Finland today,_ Desire's voice echoed with a smoky aspect that even Dream could not resist altogether, and he was not sure he wanted to. Two shadows behind his sibling, always.

Xie did not walk, xie _strode_ and the universe knew it had one of its masters presence where xie did. This was how xie moved from the gallery to Dream's throne.

_I know of all of us you must be worst affected here, brother._

Dream's starlight eyes blazed to a point that instead of darkness they burned with a deep crimson hue.

 **Do not toy with me Desire, I am not of a mood for it.** His lips were twisted into an ugly sneer and his voice a deep snarl that echoed like thunder or the wet growl of a big cat in the darkness, eyes lit by a flame.

Desire held up long artful fingers, spreading them from the palms.

_Peace brother, I come with an offering._

Dream's singular eyebrow-raise was something even Desire admitted was artful. It spoke of skepticism well-worn from their long feud.

_I will not pretend our sister's....absence leads me to shelve our animosity. It is too deep and to me, too much fun to break._

From a single raised eyebrow to furrowed brows and an almost-murderous expression was a short span of time, and Desire again raised xir hands. 

_But right now, our family is fragile. More than it's been since....since she died and I turned one of my....faces,..into her second. In truth as fragile as it was when she just stormed off and quit. Then she stopped doing her function, I think we're all grateful she isn't doing **that** again. _

Their faces both shared the same micro-expression for a moment. 

_As i said, our family is fragile. Del needs us. Do you know she's taken our sister's toy, that teddy bear, and called it Arminius of all things? If it was a tiger she'd probably call it Hobbes or Tawky Tawny._

Desire snorted. 

_Del needs us. Despair needs me, and Destruction? Our brother has a burden on him that he did not ask for but it would be unwise to let him wield it on his own. At least for now. All pain fades, eventually, Dream, even if it never does stop altogether. It fuels my sphere and my twin, and I know it more than most. Time will give this....not healing, but a_ _t least a means to deal with it. Until that moment is here, and we resume the games, I think we should do our sister's legacy one honor and for a time be brother and sibling, not Desire and my dance with Dream._

Dream's expression changed for a moment and Desire saw the deep loneliness in Dream, the incomprehensible inability to fathom simple grief, anger, feelings of abandonment. That it was as much to savor this at Dream's own expense that xie was doing this was a thing known only to xir. The emotions of xir kin were purer, rawer than anything save those of xir mother. 

**Could I have prevented this, Desire?**

Desire shrugged. 

_None of us know why she left. We know what she told Destruction, about not wanting to be asked to be our mother when our mother did not want to be. I have a feeling that was more of an excuse than anything else. I know the heart of all things, brother dearest. Hers is black and it is ridden with such maelstroms that if her mask slips slightly he r presence pervades my twin's, or mine. She suffers and she will not speak to us of what is the cause of it._

Desire clicked xir teeth. 

_ And if she will not be honest enough to discuss it, and if she decided on some means to try to address the symptoms of the problem and not the cause, she'll find herself in a great heap of trouble without any means to get out of it, or around it.  _

_Apokolips, Palace of Uxas:_

Darkseid, King of Apokolips, listened closely to the music of the spheres. One of the Seven Primordials had _changed_ again and it was not like the mutation of that which was Despair, whose power was so closely intertwined with a world of beautiful crystalline intelligences, utterly isolated and marching down the path to the Green Death. It was, of all spheres, the one connected to the Black Racer. 

He had delved more into the Racer and its nature, wondering if Death held the keys to Anti-Life. He had begun to find a strangeness that left him amused, pondering a new path. It seemed beneath the Racer there was another entity, with a True Name, one that was Life and Death. If he wished that power he sought, perhaps there was another way. His blue gauntlet tapped at his chin. One of his servants caught a glimpse of his majesty from his tower and began to bow before him, only for Darkseid to wield a small bubble of time and take great relish in how the weak little thing crumbled into ashes. It was a God, too, it would return to life within 24 hours.

So small a thing to flex his powers, and yet.....

He returned to the gallery of occult books, the knowledge hidden even from Gods. He took a copy of a book, and opened it to a page where there was an image of that truth behind the Racer. A being of dark hair, dark eyes, with an ankh. Small, so very, very small. His mouth parted into a smile. Yes.....there _were_ other paths, and if Death had left her kindred, she would be alone.

Now there was a bigger problem. How precisely did a God bell the cat of the favorite sister of the Lord Shaper without attracting the interest and the wrath of an entity he had no desire to draw the eyes of to his great kingdom?

Darkseid continued to read, for a time lapse that would seem long to his subjects.

it was the embryo of an idea yet to be fully formed, and when it took greater form it would bring great ruin and devastation in its wake, but he was Darkseid, and Darkseid Is.

_The Ash Throne, Hell:_

Death looked Lucifer straight in the eyes, her gaze reflecting a lack of intimidation. 

**_You want to spite my brother, do you not?_ **

Lucifer leaned forward, the claws of his wings catching and flexing them beyond him.

**_Oh more than spite, little Tel. Much more than that._ **

Death sighed, gritting her teeth. It was here or it was the Silver City and she'd rather die than humble herself before that man in the bowler hat. The Presence would insist that she try to heal what could not be healed and would demand from her things she was unwilling to give. So between the Deep Blue Sea and the Devil, she humbled herself further, going to one knee in front of him.

**_Then let me stay here, and do nothing to tell him where I am. Please. I left for a reason and it is not for anyone but me to know._ **

For a moment Lucifer seemed the angel he had been rather than the most powerful of all demons he currently was.

**_Your family did not hurt you, did they?_ **

Death shook her head.

**_It's not that kind of thing._ **

Lucifer nodded. 

**_All the same, stay clear of the Malebolge._ **

Death nodded in turn. 

_**I know more of that one than I ever wanted to know.** _

Lucifer's smile had far too many teeth in it for a human mouth and his veins were like starlight.

**_Yes, Trigon is rather the jackass, isn't he?_ **

Death shuddered as for a moment she saw _four golden eyes above her own and a mouth that leaned next to what was now flesh forcibly bared._

 ** _Such a child you will birth for me_** _and she wanted to scream but could not, and then wrath was kindl-_

She found herself in Lucifer's arms for a moment, her head halted from striking the floor and bleeding before his throne. 

**_My apologies. You are kin to me, more than most of them. You, after all, are Azrael, as close as that could be, and once we were like brother and sister ourselves._ **

She stared and then let him lift her to her knees. 

_**And for reminding me of that, of the better times before the Fall and before you left your function and set so many other things in motion.....** _

His eyes blazed as they met her own. 

**_None in my realm may exist for free. You shall have to earn your keep. You cannot direct souls in a certain place, no, but I shall set you the task to categorize the ranks of the dead here, and of their nature. To see what it is that you do from another perspective. I know you think me the whoremonger who'd throw you to the wolves for sport._ **

Lucifer bared his teeth, again too numerous and too sharp and for a moment his skin seemed a burning crimson red but it passed. 

_**That is too simple a path. And besides, you are family, after a fashion. Were I to spill your blood willfully intending you harm, the Furies would come for me. There is a room not far from my throneroom, where I keep my honored long-term guests, were I to have any.** _

Mazikeen materialized beside her in a cloud of sulphurous smoke.

_**Unlock that room, my beauty.** _

She bowed, and then Lucifer helped Death to her feet.

_**You shall work here, and I shall insist on having your presence around me. Old times, you understand.** _

Death nodded. Lucifer smiled, taking some pleasure in how little pulses of light echoed from his hand and seemed to thread into her being. There was potential here. He knew Death was rumored to prefer women, if she preferred any at all and this _was_ Hell. It would be an experiment, and a bit of a contest. Would his old once near-sister prove strong or....

Her tour guide stepped in.

_Hail lady of the Grave,_

_for you a room is saved._

_I your guide from span to span,_

_Greetings from the demon Etrigan._

Death looked at him with simple bemusement but she followed him, listening to the Rhyming Demon's chatter. In time, out of all the entities of Hell, Raven would find the grandson of Trigon the Terrible to be the closest thing to a friend she'd have there. In that first time of the two walking to her new space, she simply found the rhyming pattern to be obnoxious.

Arriving at a room with an opulent door of woven metal that was dark as night, she saw Etrigan's right pointer claw brush a central motif of the Jormugandr, and when the orm's mouth opened from its tale, the door parted.

Stepping in, Death could not resist a slight gape of her mouth at the space she now had to call her own.


	4. "Better to Reign in Hell"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Death adjusts to her new home. 
> 
> On the job, she encounters an old 'friend.'

_House of Bones, Hell:_

The door that Death opened was not one to some mere hovel with barely enough room for a rat to slip through. It was a large place, opulent, but tastefully so. 

Her hands were at her side, flat against her as she turned to Mazikeen, gazing with bemusement.

Zhiz you zhinksh he wouldsh givsh you a badsh rshoom?

She blinked carefully, then nodded once.

Mazikeen laughed in that horrid guttural sound.

Death squeaked with a surprised note when she felt a slap on her ass that was actually painful, Mazikeen grinning at her with a look of challenge in her face. Gritting her teeth Death strode in and did nothing but relax in the room, leaning in on a very comfy chair.

Thinking of it in those terms and knowing that this _was_ Hell, she waited around, for Hell did not have to obey mortal conventions of time. The absence of any demons in red robes with a curiously British Spanish accent led to her relaxing again and then focusing on her job. She was always working, even when she was in her realm. It was her blessing and her curse, and so long as a universe endured she did not mind it.

\-----

She was in many places at once, for she was death in its most glorious senses, and in its most tragic. In its most meaningful, and in its senseless wanton waste. She came to soldiers in wars who died at the decisive point of a victory won by their efforts and much more often to those slain for no reason and no gain, just the small detritus of conflict. She walked among the more rarified realms of ideas, escorting those that had outlived their days, even when one of them grew angry and screamed at her. When it tried to lay hands on her, she simply raised hers and glared and the idea quieted itself down and strode off.

She mourned quietly whenever she did this, for these ideas died in burnings of their records and never truly had the chances to be born.

She took infants who had barely taken first breaths or many breaths.

She took the old and few of years, those who had suffered most welcoming her as a friend, those who felt they had much to live for yelling at her, reacting with hatred. Those she still met with warmth, knowing in many ways they could not hate her worse than she already hated herself, It was not her job, in itself, but the cumulative impact of so much mortal hatred across one liftetime magnified by a thousand iterations. It was outliving her family and knowing at the end that each time she took them that she would resume life remembering all that had gone before and they knew her not at all and never remembered.

Next to the growing depth of this, mortals of species across spectrums from energy to insectoid to beings of angles that jarred and creaked at the edges of reality screaming at her, trying to attack her and to force her to grant them freedom was a minor thing indeed.

The ones that made her sadder still were those who had taken a terrible way out of an intolerable dilemma and grasped her knees or her leg, weeping and begging to know that there would be something better. These were the times where she wished she had not chosen to remain quiet to all save herself about the nature of the Sunless Lands and what it was for the souls of the dead. She knew, though, that even if she hadn't that in many cases these people would not be helped, and yet she wished to help them more than most.

Always she sought to bring them kindness, understanding. Long, long ago a girl of Colu had shown her this, had brought her to taking her one mortal day.

Her eye twitched, slightly. That mortal day, in this century, was coming up, soon. Then she would be mortal. Then her being, her very person would be subject, potentially, to the spheres of her siblings. Then, equally unfortunately, one of them might find her.

She took that day in every world and in every form she could take a lifeform in, to know life in all its ways, and in that sheer diversity there was all but assurance it would be so. She grumbled slightly to herself in the chair but that could not be helped. It did not distract her in her work, for she was there in all places, at all times where her function was needed. A kind word and a smile, seeing countless places and times and experiences, always to mark the end of one thing and the dawn of another.

Such was her blessing and such her burden.

On one job, however, she found herself pausing.

Of all the angels of the Presence and the Silver City, there were a few she despised. The Fallen, Sandalphon, in particular. He had treated her badly when he was still a follower of the Silver City and it had become worse, now.

Asmodel of the Bull-Host, a brutish lout who'd tried to seduce her until she'd told him no, to his face. And then he'd gotten nasty and violent and it had nearly touched off strife between the Endless and the Silver City and the only time that her father, Time himself, had intervened on her side.

And this one.

They saw each other often, in the course of his work. He was the Wrath of God, and his presence dealt terrible, vicious fates. Where he walked and he did his duties, so did she, and he and she spoke most.

The nature of their exchanges were sometimes friendly, in the vanishingly rare events that both were drawn into a crisis, for the Spectre viewed her as one who could do more than she did.

Sometimes, however, was seldom and in this case, seeing the strutting and arrogant New God, Steppenwolf, brought low and transformed into a living torch that was hollowed out from the inside, after escorting all his victims to their fates, and dealing with Steppenwolf's lechery with a single quick knee to his gonads that humbled him, was a sight that would have been worth the memorial in her brother's sphere.

The Spectre hovered over Steppenwolf, a look of crude satisfaction on his face.

His eyes bored into her own, empty eyes. Eyes of dark green to match his cape, which for a moment gleamed with the hue of starlight.

_Your brothers and sisters are looking for you, Mors._

She gave him a sharp glare.

**_I expected they would be._ **

The Spectre's grin was unpleasant.

_I won't tell them. You Endless always did look down on me for fulfilling my function. I punish the guilty and I ensure they meet the fates appointed to them since before time began. Am I so different to your braggart of a brother in armor who struts the fool with his sword? Or to that despot of his so-called Kingdom of the Dreaming who fastens nightmares to the necks of mortals and rewards them the more for the more cruelty they display?_

_Don't worry, as i said. Your secret will be safe with me._

Death huffed and looked away from him only for him to snarl, as she turned back.

_I don't care how distasteful you find my task. I keep you in regular work, which is what you need more than most._

For a moment Death's temper and inner issues boiled over.

Her own voice was colder than his when she growled in return:

_**You have no idea what I need.** _

Then the Spectre disconcerted her by laughing. 

_ I know more than you think, dear. My host is always one taken by you,and the body animated. That one saw you weeping,at one point, and offered you comfort and your mind was raw and open. You are a haunted creature, and that is why you have run away to some place where none can see you. For one of your caliber that leaves only a few places. I would have said the Temple Azarath but after that little incident when you left your function there's no means of your return there, of all places. To the Monitors, perhaps, and I have no doubt that they would welcome you.  _

_ But, I suspect, that you were willing to go where people would suspect you least and to delve to the belly of the Morningstar's damned Kingdom. My former lord would welcome you, in turn, purely to spite the so-called King of Stories, because they have never been friends or able to tolerate each other's presence.  _

She looked at the Spectre with genuine wariness and took a couple of steps back.

For a moment his face seemed to soften.

_My task is an eternal one and there are points where I become aware that this is my penalty for being of the Fallen without the courage to embrace my transformation, and proving neither fish nor fowl. And yet my task, I suspect, is not eternal, and eventually you will take me, yes?_

She nodded.

_Thought so,_ grunted the Spectre. _I can grasp how to one as you it would be a weighty burden to do the task you do, in the form that you do it. And if my guess is right and you have outlived one universe, or a few dozen then there must be times and circumstances where you live, and where you live the consequences of....of not finding a means to have a successor, yes?_

The look of fear on Death's eyes was something that he had once believed he would savor. The idea of his colleague and unwilling coworker afraid of him as he'd thought she should be. This was not the fear he wanted, however, and for a moment the same guilt that gnawed him over his rebellion gnawed in a different fashion. 

_Your secrets are safe with me. All I ask is that you keep yourself busy, if you are left to yourself for too long you'll brood on your thoughts and then you'll end up in a situation you have created and which you can neither escape nor control. And an Endless who creates a catastrophe for our multiverse will create a bigger one than anything short of....of the thing that should not be._

She nodded, then, and prepared to leave. 

She bit her lip for a moment and then turned, and said quietly:

**_Thank you. For....for understanding._ **

The Spectre's grin resumed its more horrifying sense as he inhaled the burning odor of Steppenwolf's body and made a low gasp of satisfaction at the odor.

_Take care of yourself. Existence needs you to remain what it is._

Death awoke in her chair in Hell and sighed. 

It was never a pleasant thing to hear the Spectre's voice. She looked around her. She'd left Slim and Wandsworth in her apartment, and she hoped that her family had taken care of them. She had not brought them with her because in every universe they renewed themselves.

They were never fully real to her, just part of the panoply of what she'd left, and yet....alone in this room with nothing she felt that same sense of smothering isolation that had led her to create her teddy and her goldfish.

Hers was a destiny to be alone, to endure when all else failed, to outlive not one universe but many. Hers an experience that left her alone and grasping for something more than what she was. And yet, in a mockery of her wishes, she created things that could not talk back.

She sighed, then, the loneliness at its worst here in Hell, a place that amplified such feelings and risked drawing her into her sister's mirrors.

She took dust of Hell from its ground and then breathed upon it, conjuring something to replace Cavendish. Another bear, this one, save that the top of his head was dark as night and his face pale as bone. His body otherwise was likewise dark.

For a moment her smile was genuine, if saddened.

**_I will call you.....Murphy._ **

And then she let herself relax on her bed in that room, staring into space as billions of portions of her were at work. 


	5. Plans within Plans within Plans:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Devil lays forth schemes. 
> 
> Death finds she has a new task in her new residence.

_The Throneroom, Hell:_

The room was shadowy, a deliberate effect created by that which had power and majesty unhindered here. And in reality on the whole, in truth. One of the two sons of the Presence, the Morningstar, the Star-Kindler. Ruler of Hell, land of punishment where his role was to give those who felt they were evil and deserved punishment what they sought for eternity...and at times to drag those who had earned it and were in denial of that earning, too. 

As befit one who lit the stars (and in his Fall it became the sphere of Destruction of the Endless to do so), he kept Hell a place of light and he became a demon of light, brilliant and terrible as the gleaming glow of an atom bomb in the seconds before it steals all sight of those too close to it. Seldom did Hell walk in darkness, and he preferred it that way. Yet here, a lesson. Here, Mazikeen, his lover and his right-hand woman. As always, at his right.

Before him, his trio who he at times allowed the amusement of ruling Hell to teach its lesser lords like Satanus and his sister Blaze, the mutual rulers of the Fourth Circle, Trigon the Terrible, King of the Malebolge, and Neron, ruler of the Sixth Circle, their places. The lords of the Circles believed themselves Hell's masters but they too were inmates. Only Lucifer had choices here and he had made them long ago in the Great Revolt.

Even as his hand moved a spherical representation of Hell, the Nine Circles and the other planes, designed as a globe for the amusement, his fingers briefly manifested jeweled rings. He let himself muse for a moment. He had not lied to himself when he said he thought of Death as like a sister to him. In the time before the Fall, before she'd left her job, she had been in all truth inducted as one of the Presence's Angels. Azrael, with her gleaming eyes of brilliant light interwoven into the feathers of her wings. Given a blade, too, as a sign of trust though she never used it.

But for all that she in her Exile had linked the kindred lineages of Time and Night and their cousin the Presence, she was not an Angel.

Lucifer grinned, his teeth bared and the V-shaped grin from ear to ear.

**_Is it not a magnificent thing that I, Lucifer the Morningstar, do?_ **

The spheres revolved.

**_I have one of the mightiest entities in all creation, the only one who could, if circumstances were equal and she wielded Father's gift defeat me in a straight up fight. Of course I would not allow them to be equal, and she was wiser than I for she eschewed his gifts from the beginning and does not go by that name he gave her....not anymore, at any rate._ **

Mazikeen looked to him, and then spoke in the language of minds, where her voice was clear. A dignity of a sort, but in truth merely a pragmatic element for this conclave of his greatest underlings.

_Could you not simply overpower her, sire, and be done with it, then? She is of their kind. Nothing good comes of harboring one of them. Their very being deforms the universe, and it is unwise to allow them to linger overmuch._

Lucifer grinned, then, his gaze flickering from Choronzon to Azazel to Belial. 

**_I could, yes. If so I wished. If I wanted to, I could bring Death of the Endless down, throw her on a bed, and defile her with sheer naked, merciless force. As if I was Asmodel or that strutting braggart Uxas._ **

He shook his head.

**_I have not ruled Hell for billions of years, my servants, by yielding to simplicity and brute force. We who are the arch-torturers of this place are no less damned than those we torment. We were splendid beings once, most of us. Some of us, of course, were born as innate personifications of Evil._ **

Not conicidentally his fingers halted on the Eighth Level where a great throne was seen and a being clad in a loin cloth with long white thigh-highs and a vast frill-like ruff extending from his body. The being had skin of crimson hue and four eyes of glowing golden unlight. 

**_Such a figure has enormous power. Of all the servants of this plane, the Lord of the Malebolge is the mightiest after us in raw power, for his is the equal to the Spectre, a kind of counter-Spectre, if you will. One to judge the living and the dead, one to burn reality clean of old infections and remake it anew. A self-contained Surtr. But it is an unsubtle and brutish thing and its sphere, that of fraud, is judged accordingly. For the realm of infinite power is a land of lava and rock, where it resculpts the souls of the damned in its image and in its likeness._ **

**_Were it to seek to a contest of raw merciless force it would have more than an even chance to replace one of you, though not me._ **

Again the smile worthy of Loki Sky-walker. 

_**But it would plunge Hell into Chaos, for the instincts of brute force, of the kind of being who is given so beautiful and fragile an entity as dear Azrael and would content oneself with such a lesser means of things would see it overthrown.** _

_**This is the lesson for all of you. Hell is not a place to rule with simple crudity. Of all of them, Azazel, it is you who must learn this most, or else your fate shall be unkind.** _

If any other had spoken to it thus, Azazel would have objected. Instead the living shadows and fanged mouths bent forward in a bow to acknowledge the point.

_**There are multiple secrets in the heart of this one, but I care not for them. The Endless are more ideas than anything else, ideas that have taken form and will and underpin Existence itself at all its levels. What I care about is two things, both simple. The first, of course, is to exact vengeance in due course on Dream of the Endless for our old enmity. In this you are correct that admitting his sister here is a part of that, for he loves her. More than he should, if I don't miss my guess. Perhaps not lust, but love? There is something in that that will hurt him more than anything else.** _

_**The second is that her greatest weakness is a simple one. Deep down, she feels unwanted, unloved. Hatred from mortals has taken a toll on her and that very beauty of hers is an effort to feel something of herself is worth having.** _

Lucifer's smile was carnivorous, teeth changing from perfect pegs in a more human-like fashion to fangs upon fangs upon fangs.

**_So then I shall give you orders, for what is to ensue._ **

The arch-demons of Hell leaned in and listened, and light shone in their eyes with the delight of the premise. After laying out the scheme, light burned in the darkness as the Morningstar blazed with the star-fire that was his innate splendor. 

**_So now, my friends, the game is afoot. So simple a thing and so simple a lever, and when Dream of the Endless learns the truth, he shall learn that his sister came here in desperation and then...._ **

He brushed his lips with his bejeweled hand. 

**_Enough scheming. Let us go to the table and eat before those who suffered in life from gluttony._ **

\-------

In her room, Death was at work preparing means to count and to categorize the vast numbers of the damned. Seeking to build a suit of armor for when she'd step into the Malebolge, that she would be able to evade much of a reunion with its lord, she became engrossed in the task. She had no idea how much time passed and then there was a brilliant flash of light and she raised a black-gloved hand in front of her face. There were stars in her eyes, because even she had those whose raw power was superior to her own.

Lucifer stepped from the portal, his finger tapping his chin.

**_In retrospect, Mistress of Life and Death, I have been too cruel to you. I would relegate someone once like a sister to me to a beancounter?_ **

The Morningstar shook his head and casually disintegrated the things she'd spent such time working on. Part of Death felt anger mixed with humiliation at that, then her eyes narrowed. The references to her youth, in her first world, and her earliest days in others, when she'd lived in the Silver City after her fall (and in some universes, but not this one, relearned to talk only because of the Presence for where Time and Night laid grip to her throat they could and did silence her beyond her own power to heal). Lucifer, and Michael Demiurgos, had nursed her to health and they truly had been a kind of family.

Until the murder of Saraquael, until the onset of the Great Revolt.

It had been a very long time since she'd let herself remember, and she was still more deeply surprised that Lucifer did.

He surprised her next when he took her wrist in his hand, and place a hand on her cheek. Her siblings loved her, but they never forgot her function and its meaning for them, and to them she was a being of fear and loathing as much as family. This felt.....

She smiled for a moment, a genuine smile, and leaned into the touch. Her eyes closed at the warmth of simple affection, and of memories. She did not see the way Lucifer smiled or the way his eyes gleamed nor the way that the light that had quietly been placed into her glowed in response, little changes worked in her will to make certain things amplified and others lessened.

She could have taken that affection for far longer than she did, and yet eventually Lucifer moved his hands away from her, and she gave a soft sound in response.

**_Instead of a bean-counter, my dear, I have such sights to show you._ **

The Morningstar's bat-like wings unfurled outward and light glowed from his right hand which he brought in front of his chest, gleaming with a hue that was hypnotic. 

He raised it to his mouth and then he _blew_ the light toward her and Death stared bemused, as the light shone around her, a pillar of fire in Hell to the demons, a pillar of cloud to the souls that were not demons.

When it passed, Death found her usual clothes _changed._ Her jeans had become armor up to her thighs, her top likewise, and her gloves were longer on her hands with gauntlets and greaves.

**_I know Hell's energy hurts you. So long as you wear this out of your room it will not. I have labored a very long time on my kingdom, and I would show you that which is most beautiful in it._ **

He raised his hand to her with a deliberate irony, his smile warm and welcoming. 

_**Beauty, for the beauty.** _

Extending her wrist, lest the contact of hands in that posture end the Morningstar by accident or harm him, Death smiled.

It was good to be loved, even from one like the Morningstar.

Her wings materialized with his, and he phased them through the wall, as the two took flight.


	6. Inferno ab Mortis:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lucifer takes Death on a tour of the Nine Circles of Hell. 
> 
> Trigon the Terrible encounters an old 'friend.' 
> 
> Destruction and Destiny and Dream meet in an abandoned apartment.

_The Apartment of Death, near the Sunless Lands:_

Destruction had only been here all of twice. This place was not in Death's realm, not truly, nor was it of it. Even he had built a realm to live in as a monument to himself. Death's home was not in her sphere, and she did not seem to live in her own Lands. For so long he had taken that merely as his sister's eccentricities and one of many. In the wake of her leaving them, all of them, his initial confidence was much less so. Destiny had asked to meet him and Dream here, and naturally he managed to find a means most improbable to beat his older brothers here. 

The goldfish were gone, he reflected. The clutter that was here when she was living here was also gone. A hand had fixed it. Somehow. Improbably.

He did not know which of them had done so, or if it was them. There was a faint trace of magic here, not of the Endless nor of their people. It was not a dangerous one, but it was there all the same.

And there were other traces, signs that something had tried to attack the outer edges of the apartment and to force its way in. The small chips that formed an omega symbol were a hint as to whom, and he had picked them up with a frown. He had never particularly cared for the spawn of the Godwave. His own creations, the children of the land of the World-Destroyers, were in his own admittedly jaundiced view able to do anything that Uxas and his kindred did, and to do so in a far less devastating fashion. And yet for all that he did not care of them, it did not pay to underestimate deities.

Perhaps this was why Destiny had actually bothered to leave his damned garden for a change and to summon his brothers.

He brushed the symbols, seeking for a moment to enjoy the distraction but it did not work. This place felt forlorn, now. Isolated. Bereft of light and of everything else with it. An impulse occurred to him, then. There was a room, in the back of the apartment, that only Del had ever seen and it was around the time that she had that she had gone from Delight to Delirium. He suspected there was more than a slight connection there, and simple curiosity, or so he told himself, led him to walk into a hall that did not distort as it had when she was around or her attention was here.

That did not bother him at first but the closer he got, the implications dawned on him and he ran to that room and then in a single overpowering strike his gauntlet _slammed_ into the door and burst it open in a shrapnel-burst of sprinkles. The room was empty, and it had nine hundred and nintety-nine shelves. Destruction's function was to keep the stars burning, among other things, so it was nothing to him to easily count great numbers and to notice a pattern.

What did disturb him greatly was the impression worn into the wood of an ankh, and an ankh that oozed her power.

He knelt, for such was his height when he stood that it barely came up to his waist (a reminder, among others, that for one of the most powerful entities in existence Death sure was surprisingly short and consistent in being so). He let himself, if cautiously far more than he wanted to admit, touch the area where the ankh had been and braced himself to see his sister's dark eyes glaring at him and her yelling at him as he created a mess and a new facet would ri-

Nothing happened. He wiped off sweat from his brow and then stood up.

_What_ **_is_ ** _this place?_

He could have sworn he heard Del's laughter for a moment as she seemed to speak from nothingness:

_WhErE heR HeArT liEs._

The moment passed, and he shook his head. If he was imagining Del where she wasn't.....

He smelled the smell of sand and of mirages, of story and of laughter and of screams and glowing eyes in the dead of night with sharp claws to rend. Dream materialized beside him.

**Why are we here, brother?**

Destruction shrugged.

_He didn't tell you either, then?_

Dream shook his head.

_Pity, I was hoping he had less of a stick up his ass about you and her._

Dream shrugged.

**I've never seen this room.**

Destruction blinked. 

_I thought you knew her best out of all of us._

Dream nodded.

**I did, or I thought I did. Then she left us all.**

His fists clenched and for a moment he was not merely tall and rangy but the hulking power of his own creations, his nightmares, but the moment passed. Destruction just put one of his gauntlets around his older brother's shoulder and they walked out. 

**This place isn't.....it's not subject to her function but it's not alive, either. I didn't know a building could feel like this.**

Then there was another smell, of change and inevitability, of the past writ in letters of stone. 

A tall figure clad in a robe with a book chained in his hand materialized.

_Brother Dream, Brother Destruction._

They nodded in turn.

_I have called you here for a reason._

They were tense, then. The words he spoke next were not the ones they'd expected to hear. 

_I know, now, where our sister has gone._

_Hell:_

Hell was a land of many facets and aspects. The Nine Circles were the most famous and they were memorialized in the works of a great poet in the Italian language, but they were only some of them. There were facets strangely akin to a distorted mirror of the Temple Azarath. There were facets that were the hellish reworking of emotions shorn of flesh and allowed to become their most horrifying extremes. There were other things, besides, mirrors of the wider subconsciousness of other species that had the concept. Yet the Nine Circles had their Nine Lords, the most powerful overlords of Hell besides the Morningstar himself and his closest cronies.

Death did not understand why Lucifer insisted on the tour like this, his hand on her wrist, nor why he made such an effort to enhance what was still there of his beauty. In truth she did not pay as close an attention as she could have to some of the circles, becoming more focused on elements of the Morningstar's appearance. Including a part of him that surprised her, for the angels had not been created with it. Demons, on the other hand, had found easy means to form it after all (or perhaps angels had too, she had not been in the Silver City a long time and had no real wish to go).

In the first circle, Limbo, she spent most of her time watching Lucifer as he introduced her to the First of the Fallen, his predecessor, and his own allies, who formed with him the Triumvirate of the First. They ruled the First Circle for they were the most powerful in Hell besides Lucifer. She did not care for the details, finding it more of a thing to interest people who were not like her. Lucifer's melodic voice and his motions.....

She did not see the way parts of her body glowed with veins lit, nor how the First, Second, and Third of the Fallen saw these glows and looked to Lucifer, whose micro-expression and micro-nod confirmed things. She did not see that the First of the Fallen's red eyes seemed to glow more brightly and a serpentine smile parted. Instead she listened in rapt silence to Lucifer, finding....something...kindling, though she did not know what it was, nor did she want to know.

From there they went to the Second Circle.

Here, in the realm of Lust, they encountered a vast maze, and above it a droning howling _thing_ that emanated beams of utter darkness. This was a strange place, covering much more than merely sexual lust. It was a place for those who sought extremes and pursued them to their limits, a place where the demonic forces were organized into a pattern of almost monastic organization. The droning howl of the thing over the circle was still a lesser thing than the Morningstar's voice. If she saw things that poked their heads out of the abyss, bodies mutilated and deformed and staring at her with hunger and with a laviscious aspect that imagined the parts of her they'd reshape and ruin, she did not acknowledge them.

Instead there was Lucifer, splendid and magnificent, and the arch-demon Leviathan, the secondary form of the monster that was one of three with the Behemoth and the Ziz, seeming to acknowledge its master.

The labyrinth itself was vast, and there was a pattern to it. A puzzle box, almost. She wanted to ask questions of what the nature of that box was, but Lucifer simply took her wrist and startled her by kissing her hand, stifling her question, leading her jaw to gape and her to just mutely accept flying with him from the droning howling _thing_ and the strangeness of that circle to the next circle.

To the third circle, then, and to the element that was here. A circle dedicated in the image of Gluttony, the spirits of the Seven Deadly Sins themselves entrapped on the Rock of Eternity. Here the presiding figure over this circle was a rail-thin jagged _tear_ in existence of gleaming eyes and fanged mouths. It went by many names, among them Lord of the Flies, and it bowed to her gravely.

 ** _You have brought many to my realm, great Lady of the Endless,_** it spoke with a sonorous aspect far more powerful than its impossibly thin form allowed. _**I am grateful to you for your bounty, for that bounty and for all that it means, and will have meant.**_

She uneasily acknowledged this with a nod, as Lucifer kept his hand on her wrist and massaged it, and she couldn't help but fidget slightly. Lucifer saw this and his smile was warm and that same feeling hovered at the edge of her being, and she stamped on it ruthlessly as she had Desire's twisted creation the Mercy.

Then there was the Fourth Circle. Here there were two lords, not three, as with the First. A brother and a sister. Both of them with skin of crimson hue and horned, the brother's horns extending upward in two great semicircular loops of bone. The brother wore an outfit like a debased parody of a Roman's lorica segmata, hammering his hand against his breastplate and nodding to the appearance of Hell's king. The sister wore much less, for hers were the kindred of the succubi, and her clawed feet dug into the ground. She bowed, but in a lesser sense, and with a deep resentment.

Her eyes narrowed at the sight of one of the Endless being taken with Lucifer in his progression, at the ease with which she believed it was an inspection, as if Lucifer ben Yahweh were not sending soundings through their spheres that disrupted any prospects of a rebellion. It was stranger, too, to see one of the Seven dragged around, the ways her expression focused on Lucifer. She doubted the Endless truly _saw_ anything.....and then her eyes narrowed further. Lucifer knew there was _something_ that had caused bad blood between her and Trigon, Lord of the Malebolge.

He was quite intentionally dragging her to _that_ reunion. Were the boundaries between Circles less rigid, as a prospect of the rivalries and occasional wars, it would be worth it to be a fly on that wall. But alas, they were. And the prospects of an intra-circle alliance with the Eighth Circle had occurred to her brother as it did to her, meaning both were surprisingly affable to a Morningstar who was not deceived a bit. But it mattered not, it was the nature of all things in Hell to be shameless and treacherous even in plain sight. And, of course, they were the lords of the Circle of Greed. Why would they not aspire more than most to usurp the son of the so-called Creator? 

From there Death was taken to the Fifth Circle, where slept a creature until such time as it would awaken in the War of Light, and yet no less powerful was its presence for all of this. Atrocitus, who shared with Trigon the Terrible a distant kinship due to both being the last survivors of the Empire of Tears, did not need to awaken to make his circle a painful and a bloody place where blood was shed, and skulls were taken only for bodies to regenerate and to begin it anew. This place hurt her more than most in Hell, for the agony of the mortals who longed for her touch and were unable to have it were like knives to her own flesh. She wept from the pain even as she strode with Lucifer in the bloody mire of the sea that marked this place, as Lucifer arrived at the quasi-tomb of Atrocitus and inspected it, and then nodded with a curt laugh and strode on.

They flew and blood trailed from them and then they came to a place like a fortress. Inviolable against all but the most determined attackers, in the presence of the Morningstar and she who would outlive all existence and take Hell and its inhabitants when the time came, it was as nothing at all. A being strode forth to the edge of the fortress. Oddly akin to the later figures who would rise centuries from this point in mortal climes, he wore what was both armor and spandex, with a cape behind him that reached near to his knees but stopped well short of the ground.

Neron's gaze was the most sour and wrathful of all the Hell-Lords, for he had the greatest ambitions in Hell and its politics outside the First of the Fallen (where others, like Leviathan and the demon Trigon seemed to play in separate spheres entirely and were only loosely affiliated with Hell). His realm trembled from the Sounding, and when he realized that Lucifer really did have Death of the Endless in his arms and the nature of that light glowing in her, his brows furrowed. That was a dangerous game the Hell-King was playing, and if he was playing for the stakes he thought he was, it would risk bringing upon all of them the wrath of the Endless.

Then again, such would probably lead to his fall or his abdication, and then, at last, it would come to the trial of strength for which he ached. He, Neron, King of the Sixth, versus the First of the Fallen and his two treacherous brothers. He had received a communication from both the Norns and the Oneirae, recently. That time was drawing nigh. The Morningstar's long reign would come to an end, and there would be such glorious strife.

None of this told, and he knew that the Morningstar had found elements of his preparations in his Sounding. He brazenly gazed at the King, only to realize by the narrowed eyes that this was a gamble that worked better when the target was not in actual fact omniscient or the next best thing to it. His head had that strange sensation like electric knives carving at it that marked the Morningstar battering his way into his mind. His eyes pulsed with the warning and there was a trickle of blood from Neron's nose. He remained on his feet and Death was too star-struck by the lights that had gone from small circular 'dots' around her body to almost a bruise of light covering a much broader portion of her being.

The Seventh Circle, ruled by a triarchy of Sandalphon, Sachiel, and Sariel, was a much swifter inspection, even if Sariel's eyes gleamed with a curious light in Death's direction, where Sandalphon's grin was much more predatory. Death had been unable to focus much there or to tell the passage of time much beyond glimpses and names. Sandalphon clad in clothing like that of the business suits of the 20th Century of Earth. Sachiel in ethereal moonlight-weave clothing that was both a robe of temptation and armor. Sariel clad in ice with a fox-like muzzle and ram horns.

The Eighth Circle saw all of this implode in a second when they arrived at its edges. This was a plane of magma and endless heat, where the most powerful forces were hulking barely human-like creatures with axes that gleamed with fire. It was a realm with a lord she knew all too well and all too intimately in ways she had never wished to know, nor to have known. The lord of that place had known of her arrival since before she'd come near his domain, and he stood for a change not as the colossus that towered over the Morningstar. Instead he stood merely at twice the height of a man with hair a deep red rather than arctic white.

Trigon the Terrible's grin was all fangs as his eyes roved over Death's, and it intensified further as he saw the light gleaming in her body.

**_You play a foolish game, Great King of Hell. You think you can seduce Death herself? You don't seduce Death, you overawe it._ **

Lucifer's smile was unkind.

**_And why would I take advice on that from you?_ **

Lucifer only then saw Death frozen in blank horror, her lips pressed tightly together. 

Trigon laughed, slamming his scepter into his hand.

Then he pointed it straight at her.

_**I came close to overpowering that slut on your arms a few billion years ago. I overstepped myself in seeking to wield her true name instead of simply finishing where I began.** _

Trigon then moved in a blink of an eye and then he was right next to Death, his right hand pulling her up by the waist to a point that they were at a height where she saw into all four of his eyes.

**_Lord Morningstar, I ask that you let me finish what I began. She owes me my Daughter of Darkness._ **

Lucifer laughed uproariously and Trigon froze, dropping Death, who flew up into the air away from him as he sighed with a bored sound and then in a single _pulling_ held her where she did not descend, but she could not rise further.

_**One will be born who will give you the child you seek, even when you have three strapping sons who are the envy of most in Hell. Belial, father of Etrigan of Camelot, Ruskoff, Son of Deception, Skuge, Son of Devastation.** _

_**Three sons the envy of any in Hell and yet you want a daughter, too. So greedy, Trigon of the Malebolge.** _

He could see Death's fear, the kind of memories further awakened at that moment and then his scheme seemed to clear a path for him and with a casual sigh, he snapped his fingers and Trigon found himself cast back within his circle.

**_The answer to your question is no. The one you seek shall come, Trigon of the Malebolge. You shall find her on the continent on the planet called Earth that looks like an overgrown turtle, on its westernmost side. There is a sphere in your name dedicated there, though you no doubt lack the wit to see it, my strong blunt instrument._ **

With that they returned to the Ninth Circle, the domain of Traitors. In its heart, the heart of all Hell, was his throne, his palace, and his throneroom. 

Lucifer looked at a trembling, crying, shaking Death who looked at him as if he'd hung the moon for fixing a mess that a more rational Death less affected by the power already at work in her would have seen Lucifer had created, to precisely find which if any of his spheres could hurt her as much as to do one of his inspections of his Lords of the Nine Circles. She looked at him with that admiration and gratitude, and then in an act of what to her was impulse and to him was the very first phase of a plan within a plan within a plan, drew her lips to his to give him a very quick kiss that was close-mouthed, in gratitude. Then she seemed to almost flush, if she had been capable of that, and hastily returned to her room.

Lucifer then turned to Mazikeen.

_**Inform the lord of the Malebolge that he is to appear before my throne. I have information to gain from him, and if he defies me, I will gladly unleash the rulers of the Third and the Fifth upon his Circle.** _

Mazikeen nodded and then vanished in a cloud of brimstone and dark choking black smoke.


	7. The Heart of the Heartless World:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Trigon tries to make sense of recent events. 
> 
> Destiny of the Endless puts his foot down. 
> 
> Death is very confused.

_The Malebolge, Throneroom:_

Trigon the Terrible slouched on his throne. His grandson sat at the far edge of the room, while his three sons paced in front of him. Their father was in a strange mood since he'd encountered the Endless at the side of the Morningstar, and his wrath crackled out into his domain in thunderstorms of quite literally hellish nature. His victims and his demons cowered, but his three sons and his one grandson did not care. 

For a time he continued to brood, directing bolts of lightning to strike various victims of his domain, including a Black woman chained in barbed wire. A victim of the caprice of another Endless, who had a poor record, to put it politely, with handling rejection. Trigon, for all his delight in defiling woman, had not touched her since he'd personally placed her in the chains in that fashion. Not because it would not have suited his nature but more for the prospect of a bargaining chip.

Trigon finally moved from where he'd brooded since the sounding and the progression of the Morningstar.

**_My sons, help me make sense of what I saw._ **

His sons were wary. Well should they have been, for Trigon was a volcanic force long in the brooding and swift and total in the wrath when the brooding subsided.

**_An Endless, at the side of the Morningstar. No less an Endless than the one I nearly consummated my desires upon and brought forth your sister before all of you. The Endless who is the most beholden and the most devoted to her family. Here. In Hell. At Lucifer's side._ **

From slouching he assumed a much more regal posture. 

_**It is no secret that her younger brother the Lord Shaper and the King are great foes. They have been. Even the Nada incident could not broach those enmities. Now we have an Endless, his older sister, who is close to him. Too close, I've heard rumors say.** _

Etrigan's eyes narrowed.

**_If Dream and Death too close be,_ **

**_in that what is there to see?_ **

Trigon snorted. 

_**If those rumors are true it would be one-sided, and very one-sided at that. I know how that Endless works. There is a heart in her of a simpering maggot-ridden goodness, a thing that is detestable to those of us here in Hell. She loves her family, more deeply than most beings of that kind of power would. So if she is here, there must be either strife between the King and the Lord of the Dreaming, or a means to prevent that strife.** _

Skuge coughed.

**Father, if that be true, then what is it that we must do?**

_**I don't know, son.**_ Trigon's voice was musing. **_The Queen will remain a bargaining chip for later. For now.....I believe that I will go to the Dreaming and speak to its King myself._**

Etrigan blinked. 

**_Grandfather, is that wise?_ **

**_The Dreaming-King might demand all your eyes._ **

Trigon snorted.

**_They don't know that I met their sister in the past. Well, Destiny of the Endless might but what would that matter? The Cosmic Voyeur would only see things, he would never stop them even if his family suffers for them. Again._ **

Trigon stood up.

**_I shall don my formal clothes and then I shall see if the Dreaming-Lord would permit me an audience._ **

He turned to his sons and his smile was something terrifying, a gash of sharp white teeth in a crimson face.

**_There are opportunities here, my sons. No epilogue here unless we make it, if we want our future we go and take it._ **

_The Dreaming:  
_

**She's WHERE?  
**

Dream's wrath was incandescent. Thunder pealed in the Dreaming and fires burned portions of its outer domains. 

_This is why he wanted you informed here, brother. Please. I know this is your realm and you are its master. Don't do anything foolish._

His much taller and bulkier younger brother's voice was clear, and it was soothing, and it stilled the momentary outburst of Dream's wrath. Destiny gave his brother a soft quiet nod of gratitude, one his brother returned.

_For some reason she is in Hell. She has made an overture to Lucifer the Morningstar, and he has granted her asylum._

Dream froze for a moment. His eyes narrowed and his mind, wide-ranging in thought, crystallized the thoughts into a clear pattern.

**Your book did not tell you where she went at first.**

Destiny nodded. _Correct._

Dream's tone was suspicious.

**And now it has.**

Again Destiny nodded. _Correct._

Dream tapped his chin.

**Why?**

Destiny's smile was somewhat tentative. 

_I have read ahead, brother, to find out but I do not know. She has a power, at times,to elude my gaze and that of my book. It is not absolute, but it permits me the delight of uncertainty._

Destruction grunted.

_All right then, what do we do?_

Destiny shrugged.

_The book says, Brother Dream, that a lord of one of the Circles will come to you with a bargain concerning information on our sister._

Both Dream and Destruction became as still and stiff as the statues in Destiny's garden. 

**A good bargain or a bad one?**

_I cannot say.  
_

Dream sighed. 

Destiny vanished in a flash of light, and with that Dream returned with Destruction to Death's apartment for a moment.

_Why are we back here?_

Dream looked to Destruction.

**We cannot turn the lights on here, though we can make our own.**

From sand he conjured a candle and he blew it into shining a light that was surprisingly brighter than a more normal candle would have been. More torch than candle. 

**This is all we have left of her, for now. I want to keep this place, and to keep it as well as we can.**

Destruction sighed.

_Very well._

A few days later, as the Dreaming would have seen it, and instantaneously in the manner of passage of time in Hell, a column of flame materialized out of a sphere of white light in front of the gates of Dream's palace. From it emerged a being in white boots and thigh-highs, and a white ruff with sharp horns extending from it. His long white cape billowed in a wind likewise, as the being strode to the gate. The Wyvern, the Gryphon, and the Hippogriff looked at him.

**_I am Trigon the Terrible, Master of the Malebolge. I would have audience with your master._ **

The gates of the Dreaming opened and Trigon walked, his scepter materializng out of thin air and tapping on the ground in unity with his footsteps. His face was carefully impassive. 

\-------

_Death's new apartment, Hell:_

Death sat on her bed, Indian-style, boots tossed to the side, one of her stockings likewise tossed, the other on her left foot. She kept her hand pressed to her lips. 

She'd been a part of what was Lucifer's idea of an inspection, keeping an eye on the Lords of the Circles. She'd had the chance to see him in action and to appreciate what a beautiful and powerful being he truly was.

She had kissed him. She had kissed the Morningstar, after he had kept the demon of the Malebolge from hurting her again. An impulsive thing, close-lipped, but she'd still _kissed_ him. 

She liked women. She was very emphatic about that. Insofar as she sought pleasures of her own in her mortal day or outside it, it was with women. Or equivalent thereof.

Yet she'd kissed a Fallen who was by no means a woman, and she knew that.

Her hand kept brushing her lips.

Why had she done that? Simple gratitude at being spared an encounter with the monster in the Malebolge?

She had felt _lust_ looking at Lucifer, too. Not simply an appraisal of his admittedly attractive (and even if she preferred women she knew aesthetic beauty in men and knew what it was to see that. Lucifer was perfect, almost entirely so in her eyes). That disturbed her more than anything else.

She felt warm, much moreso than she wanted to (she did not see that light was shining in various areas of her body, and that the power of that light was directly connected to the warmth for in Lucifer's domain, his power was absolute).

It did not take much for her, sweating in a manner that surprised her, to remove her top and her pants, reclining against the bed in a feverish heat.

Lust pulsed in her, and she wondered if the brush-fire encounter with the droning pulsing _thing_ over that labyrinth affected it.

She felt a power pulling at her, wanting her to yield to the lust that burned like fire in her, that tempted her with visions and flashes of an angel with shining eyes.

An angel she had broken her usual sense of herself to kiss.

Her eyes closed for a moment and she willed her own strength to pulse outward....and then a mist seemed to seep from her pores like a gleaming fog that shone with a brilliant starlight hue and she waved her hand to dismiss it.

Whatever power was within her was gone.....and yet to her dismay the throbbing in a part of her that it had awoken did not vanish with it.

When the Devil's servant-woman Mazikeen knocked on her door she knew who it was, and with her hair slick against her and her own surprising exhaustion weighing her down she got herself off the bed and opened the door.

Mazikeen cocked her head, half of it hidden behind a mask and then for a moment seemed to almost flush at the sight of Death, standing there, her hands against the doorframe, her body visibly breathing, and the ways her body moved.

Then Death smiled for a moment.

She liked women, Mazikeen had given her a signal of interest, and she _was_ a demon. They did not handle this like other species did.

She grabbed Mazikeen by the wrist and then shut the door as the demoness let herself smile very broadly indeed.

How amusing. After all her master and lover's efforts, it would end up benefiting her first. Oh how very, very dreadfully shameful.

As Death locked the door, Mazikeen then smiled and then gestured to the bed and Death stalked toward it, as she saw the ways she moved.

It hadn't quite worked the way her master had anticipated but it had worked enough, and she was more than content to watch Death moving.

When Death got to the bed, Mazikeen threw her down on it and, not yet discarding her own clothes, contented herself with stealing a kiss from the Endless.


	8. Schemes Within Schemes:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Etrigan goes to make a quiet contact with the Hell Priest, ruler of the Order of the Gash, the most powerful of the Second Circle's factions. 
> 
> Trigon the Terrible speaks to the King of the Dreaming. 
> 
> Death of the Endless finds herself in a very awkward position.

_Death's Room:_

She woke up the next morning in a very favorable haze, astonished that she, of all beings, had actually slept in any form. The Endless did not sleep. 

She could not flush in the sense that other beings did for she did not truly bleed, for ideas did not have blood and bones and organs as other entities did.

She did glow slightly at the thought of what had happened. The touches of Mazikeen's hands and her lips. Even with the damage on half her face she was superb at things. She had not had such a satisfactory encounter since she'd taken one mortal day on the world of Czarnia. She felt _good._ Very good, in fact. Enough that beneath her covers she sighed in satisfaction, turning to the slumbering Mazikeen. The Endless did not sleep, nor did they need to sleep. Demons were different, they did need sleep every so often after a sufficiently powerful exertion, one of many weaknesses placed upon them as the Fallen.

She glowed somewhat more brightly at the thought that what had followed from throwing Mazikeen on the bed had been enough for that. She slipped out of it, stretching, wincing slightly. Now _that_ was moreso.

Then the haze faded when her more conscious mind remembered who and what Mazikeen was to Lucifer the Morningstar. Death gulped slightly. Well, great. Now she'd just given him an angle he was going to use against her regardless. She shrugged. In truth merely coming here meant it would be only a matter of time, Whenever it happened, it would happen. For now, there was....there was fun. Her getting to make her own decisions, for a change.

The glow returned and she slipped back in as Mazikeen's eye on the side of her face that was not blinded and dried flashed open with golden light.

Mazikeen reached out toward Death and pulled her in and Death eagerly welcomed the embrace, and Mazikeen's not so accidental motion of her hand down her body, cupping a part of her that got a pleased moan as she thumbled her nipple, the demoness's grin truly devilish.

\--------

_The Dreaming:_

Trigon the Terrible strode proudly to the gates of the palace of Dream of the Endless. His very passage had disturbed the weather here, turning a day in the Dreaming that had been bright and sunny dark and brooding, fell lightning of the brightest green glimmering. The Dreaming was a realm, yes, but it was the mortal collective unconsciousness of all life. An incarnation in the most malignant form of fell impulses and of Evil as a concept in itself (not Tyranny, that was the sphere of Uxas, the so-called New God who had taken the regal name Darkseid) could not but disturb what he passed. 

As he _was_ Evil writ raw, he did not particularly care at the psychic resonance cast by his tread. He thought it was funny, in point of fact. So too that his scepter's impact was louder than that of his footsteps, a subtle reminder that the Dreaming did not obey the laws or the whims of Hell, let alone of his sphere where he was lord and master absolute.

And so Trigon arrived, at last, at the gate. Three dreams stood there, the guardians who shielded the very heart of the collective Unconsciousness of all life. A Gryphon, hulking and fearsome with a raptorial beak and eyes that gleamed with a light a Lord of a Circle would envy. To its right the Hippogriff. Gryphons ate horses, so the prospect that a hippogriff could exist was an impossibility, a concept that _cracked_ things. Naturally the Lord of the Dreaming would have one to send a message, for this was the Land of Dream, where fabled cities like Sarnath of old and the Land of Lomar could rise, and where all that was or would ever be were to one degree or another intersected.

Trigon was seen by many of his fellow Lords of Hell as a blunt instrument and fairly stupid and he knew it. In truth he did not care, for his Circle was but a small portion of his true nature and his true domain. He was a lord of multiverses, with a separate kingdom much more his own where he was a cruel lord, but a free one. Trigon went by other names in other realms, Angra Mainyu/Ahriman, Skath, Ddrez, Dormammu, Malebolgia. Mara.

It was with this wider perception that he saw the messages coded into the Hippogriff and into the kaleidoscopic light that blazed from its eyes. His upper two flashed in turn and his fangs were bared but it simply looked at him disinterested.

The last was a Wyvern perched on the edge that roared with the primordial foghorn-bellow of the reptilian behemoths whose existence was coded into so many worlds in different forms. This Trigon heard and it made no impact on him and he waited.

The doors of the palace of Dream of the Endless were open to him. A single sound echoed from lips and fanged teeth that parted slightly.

_**Hah.** _

Into the belly of the beast stalked the Demon, down the hallways with the symbols and sigils of the Endless blazing. He was intrigued that the sigil and memories of Death herself seemed so prominent but locked away any part of him that would have given away the deeper truths away, the kind for which Dream might react....poorly.

And then he was there, at last. In the citadel of Dream of the Endless, before the Lord Shaper's Throne.

He bowed, formally, with a respect he did not feel, nor was he ever going to feel.

 _ **Lord Shaper**_ , his voice rumbled. ** _I come to you bearing a gift, as is the custom of those who speak to the governor of the unconsciousness of all Life._ **

With that his left hand moved, and energy combined and crushed itself to form the shape of an emerald.

**Why would I need such a thing, Malebolge-King?**

_**You can never have too many amulets, my lord, to sustain your magnificence.** _

Dream snorted for a moment, but he reached out and he took.

 **Yes....** he said, after a moment of holding it and perusing it from multiple angles as its nature seemed to be both a vacuum of power and a means to unleash it in its full rawness. **This will do nicely.**

He placed it beside his throne.

**So tell me, Lord of the Malebolge, why are you here?**

Trigon grinned then, his teeth far too numerous for his mouth and heat glowing like a fire from mouth and throat.

**_I know your sister's place, in Hell._ **

Dream shrugged. **My brother Destiny has already informed me that she is in Hell.**

Trigon's grin became nastier. _ **Did he tell you she is with the Morningstar?** _

Dream's nonchalant nature vanished then and he froze, leaning forward.

**She's where?**

_**A guest in the King's own royal palace. I suspect that the Morningstar intends to hurt her.** _

Dream's hands grasped the arms of his throne tightly.

**How?**

_**For that information, Lord of the Dreaming, I would make a bargain with you.** _

Dream's grip intensified further and his starlight eyes flashed as his jaw became very firm and his neck taught.

 **Say on,** he growled. Trigon's words in turn were spoken far more calmly: 

_**I would have my Daughter of Darkness, when the time draws nigh to her birth, have it that nothing, by any power save that of Destiny of the Endless, could stop her fulfilling her place as the Gem. None of my daughters have been born to full term and lived long enough to truly grasp what they are. I want that one to be unkillable**._

Dream blinked, then nodded. In his Garden Destiny saw the wording in a box on his panel, Trigon for a moment seeming a being of dark shadows with a head of fire.

_**Then in that case, Dream of the Endless, I shall tell you. It is my belief that your sister suffers from deep hurts she dares not speak, that her very heart is full of sorrows. Lucifer, King of Hell, I believe, intends to gain her assent to a seduction, to make her believe after it that her sorrows have found a balm, and then he shall cast her out as she was cast away from Time and Night.** _

Dream froze.

**How can you be certain she suffers so?**

_**I have seen her, Dream-King, when the Morningstar brought her by on one of his progressions. She looked at him as if he hung the moon and we need not neglect that your sister's taste is not to men, angelic or Fallen.** _

Dream's finger brushed his chin.

Worthy information for the price you have asked. **You could ask for a greater, or another. You have answered a question that puzzles me, and soothed a fear that I have had.**

Trigon cocked his head, somewhat disbelieving what he heard.

_**You did hear me state that the King of Hell intends to wound a sister of yours deeply wounded, and to make that wound as damaging as possible? He intends to do this out of spite toward you.** _

Dream laughed, a low and confident one.

 **That is my sister you speak of. The End of all Things Mortal** (Trigon couldn't resist a slight scowl at that phrase even as he acknowledged its truth). **She is no maiden, and even if she did suffer, she would not suffer as grievously as you say. The Morningstar would grasp a tiger at by the ears and it will gnaw his face** (he heard the gloating element and understood then the degree to which Dream despised his master and that it was every bit as mutual). **As I have said, one favor here is not enough, Lord of the Malebolge, ask of me a second.**

Trigon paused for a moment. **_Very well, Lord Shaper. I ask but a simple gift. I want Azar's citadel to fall. Across the universes we pursue each other in a rivalry transcending this one. Here, in this universe, Azarath the monastery, realm of the Goddess-priestess, shall be no more._ **

Dream of the Endless did not know much of Azarath, nor did he wish to. It had been to that realm his sister had fled whens he abandoned her function and reality had nearly unraveled. It was there that the malevolent entity that the cult worshiped had carved fell runes into his sister's body, runes that Destruction and he had blended the full nature of their strength to purge (the only time he had seen her unclad. 

It was of no account to Dream, then, to nod and to accept this as Destiny of the Endless watched and read in his book with a hint of disquiet. Dream had done a foolish thing. That which restrained the Demon and his spawn was doomed, now, its power fatally weakened. A haven of safety, forever breached. He knew, as he knew many things that the scurrilous libel that Dream had a lust for Death that he wished to slake upon her flesh was just that. They were brother and sister. Yet it was incidents like this that kept the libel believable, for they displayed that partiality in Morpheus that was one of his many less desirable traits.

Destiny read onward, knowing that it was times like this where his being was its greatest burden.

\------

_Death's Room:_

Where Mazikeen gave the door an irritated look as she dipped her head up from its very pleasant location, Death knew the knock before it dawned on the half-faced one who was the closest that Hell had to a Queen. Another knock and Maz's look of irritation intensified as she slipped on her own clothes with a wave of her hand and Death was only partially dressed when Lucifer knocked. To see Death's reaction at Lucifer seeing her with everything she would have done much to conceal from him for the duration exposed, her pants halfway up her legs and her top partially on, hair even messier than otherwise was mortification was understatement of Biblical proportions. 

She tried for modesty's sake to create a changing screen in front of her but Lucifer, with a more than somewhat malicious smile disintegrated it with a wave of her hand as his eyes traversed her.

 **You are late, Mazikeen,** he drawled.

 _I apologize, my Lord King_ , she said smoothly, and she slipped out and went to her duties.

Lucifer's eyes remained on Death and then in a sudden fluid motion he sprang forward and slammed her against the wall with an overpowering boom.

His voice hissed in her ear:

**I do _not_ appreciate being given horns by a _guest._**

Death quivered, he noted with approval, in his arms. Their bodies were pressed against each other and the memory of that feeling would be achingly strong and play very well into what he did with Mazikeen that evening.

**I could send you out of this for much less.**

Death shook more violently then and then he saw a bit of sudden desperation on her face that left him for a moment disquieted.

**_Please, don't._ **

It was not shouted, nor whispered. A dull statement, of hopeless resignation in a toneless voice that made him release her.

**Very well, then. But you have dishonored me, in a manner fortunately that shall take a fair bit of time to spread to my Circle-Lords.**

He watched as she stood there, not even trying to dress herself fully knowing it was more than a waste at this point.

**_Whatever you want me to do, Lord Morningstar, I will do._ **

Lucifer Morningstar's smile changed, then, and he leaned forward to crowd her against the wall, his wings scraping along it as one of his hands reached out to cup Death's left breast. She gulped then as he whispered into her ear:

**I shall take you up on that. You shall have today and tonight off. Tomorrow, come before my throne. And dress formally, not in this ridiculous attire.**

Death nodded then, ashamed, and stayed in her room the next day and the next night, only drinking a small amount of liquid that appeared at the will of the Morningstar when she made her thirst known.

\----------

_Outskirts of the Second Circle:_

There were no Circles Etrigan liked less than the Second. Its Demons all considered themselves Cenobites, Monks. 

Monks in Hell! Demons abiding by monastic rules!

A travesty, even by the standard of the Circles.

Nor did it help that the lord of this Circle was like the world's worst brass music section. And that all it said was "GOD" over and over again...Pfah. Boring and trite, the whole lot of them.

On the edge of the vast labyrinth of pleasures Etrigan stood and waited.

His wait was longer than he wanted, enough to be a deliberate slight and a reminder that Leviathan, Lord of the Second, had as much contempt for his circle as the other way around.

Then there was a rushing sound and bright white-lit mist and a figure strode out. He was clad in leather, a mixture of robe and dress. His nipples were bare and pierced by needles and bled, and his face was a grid marked by endless rows of pins.

The Hell Priest gave him a look of disdain, as if he was shit on a shoe.

Etrigan, his low voice spoke with its echoing reverberations.

**_Ah Hell Priest, so good to be here before you, many things have we to say and to do._ **

The Hell Priest crossed his arms. **Get to the point, Etrigan.**

_**Ah, Pinhead, impatient do you be. Such contacts as this, the Morningstar must not see.** _

The Hell Priest glared more intensely, but acknowledged the point.

**Very well, come down with me. You know, I hear the mortals are planning a new means to summon us.**

Etrigan shrugged. _**Let me guess, hearts to offer dripping in blood, names dragged thoroughly into the mud?** _

The Hell Priest shook his head, **No. A puzzle box. My master has even given the mortals creating it inspiration for a suitable name. The Lament Configuration.**

Etrigan shrugged again and they descended more deeply into the depths of the Second Circle.


End file.
